Chinese after-party for Oscar champion

"I hope this is a universal story that connects nations," says Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire when he was in Beijing on Tuesday to promote the film.

Having swept the 81st Academy Awards with eight wins including that of the Best Picture and Best Director, the film hits Chinese mainland theaters today.

Boyle is optimistic about the film's reception in China, a country often compared with India in terms of its locations, population and speedy economic development.

"China and India both have huge populations," he said. "In both countries there is a huge mass of ordinary people, who will find that the character's life story could be theirs, too. Everybody's life story is worth something - that's one of the reasons this film works all over the world."

Boyle was delighted about the film's success in South Africa, where it debuted in the same week as The Watchman. It was only shown in half as many screens as the blockbuster but took twice as much money.

As one of 20 foreign films annually screened on the Chinese mainland, the rags-to-riches tale will hit some 2,000 theaters across the country.

"The film shows a concern for the grass roots, is inspirational and has a special artistic beauty," said Weng Li, a spokesman for China Film Group, which handles the importing of foreign films to Daily Variety. Weng also revealed CFG is considering importing more Oscar films to China this year.

Slumdog Millionaire premiered in Hong Kong on Feb 26 and raked in HK$1 million ($128,899), dwarfing previous first-day takings there by Oscar winners like Million Dollar Baby (HK$138,863) in 2005 and Crash (HK$114,922) in 2006.

It has generated widespread controversy in India, however. Some people criticized Boyle for depicting their country as poor, dirty and backward, while others cheered its revelation of the country's true nature.

Boyle laughed off the issue: "It is democracy," he said. "India has a billion people. They disagree with everything all the time, and they are so full-on, never half-hearted. It is full of debate there and it's good debate."

The controversy, Boyle believes, stems to a large extent from India's own film industry.

"Bollywood tends to depict only near-childish fantastic pictures of the middle class - that tends to be Bollywood's big obsession," he said. "Some Bollywood people think films should not focus on slums, while others say that's exactly how Bollywood pictures would improve, by actually catering to more ordinary people."

Boyle, who denied he was being lined up to direct the next Bond film, shares his views of Hollywood.

"Hollywood is business, just like Bollywood," he said. "It turns out hundreds of films and caters to different things. It does not really suit me.

"I like to take a limited amount of money and try to make it feel like 100 million dollars on the big screen. You can do that slightly better outside the Hollywood system. I call it working off the radar, so that nobody knows what you are doing."

If you were making Slumdog Millionaire in Hollywood, Boyle explained, its central character, Jamal, would never have been tortured at the start of the film and the kids would never have been blinded.

"They would say 'forget about that, people will leave the cinema if you show that scene'. And you would never have the song and dance at the end, because the tone changes too much. What they do is go for the middle ground - but it is things off the middle-ground that really interest me."